Glen Peterson

China's education and the industrialized world : studies in cultural transfer

Thomas Dixon was a lawyer, North Carolina state legislator, Baptist minister, lecturer, and novelist. This novel, an abridgement by Cary Wintz was originally published in 1905. It reflects turn-of-the-century attitudes most southerners had about Republican rule during Reconstruction.

To Be or Not to Be a Refugee: The International Politics of the Hong Kong Refugee Crisis, 1949–55

While a great deal is known about the international politics of refugee policy in Europe since the appointment of the first international commissioner for refugees by the League of Nations in 1921, relatively little attention has so far been paid to similar questions involving the plight of refugees in Asia. This article examines one of the first attempts by the newly established UNHCR to extend its mandate beyond the European context for which it was originally conceived. During the early 1950s the British colony of Hong Kong briefly became the focus of intense UN and international attention over the issue of how to treat the hundreds of thousands of Chinese refugees who fled Chinas communist revolution for the colony. The influx of refugees, many of whom were destitute, threatened to overwhelm Hong Kongs infrastructure and prompted urgent calls for their resettlement abroad. The ensuing UNHCR investigation into the legal status of the Hong Kong ‘refugees’ offers an instructive example of the politicisation of the UNHCR in the context of the unfolding Cold War in Asia and reveals the deep divisions that emerged within the Anglo-American alliance over how to deal with Hong Kongs refugee population. The paper argues that the UNHCR Survey Mission in Hong Kong was doomed to fail given the mutual suspicions and incompatible agendas of the various players involved.

Socialist China and the Huaqiao: The Transition to Socialism in the Overseas Chinese Areas of Rural Guangdong, 1949-1956

Life in the overseas Chinese areas of rural Guangdong has changed dramatically since 1978 (Johnson, 1986). Today the &dquo;overseas connections&dquo; of the domestic overseas Chinese are an integral and valued component of China’s national strategy for the achievement of the Four Modernizations. Yet the domestic aspect of the huaqiao (overseas Chinese) legacy bequeathed to China’s communist leaders has received little study in the West. It is not always recognized that since 1949 the PRC has directed the bulk of its bureaucratic effort in overseas Chinese policy not to Chinese living in foreign countries, but rather toward the affairs of qiaojuan (overseas Chinese family dependents) and guiqiao (returned overseas Chinese) within China. The history of this effort has been a deeply troubled and tortuous one. This article examines the transition to socialism, 1949-1956, in the overseas Chinese areas of rural Guangdong, and the special difficulties encountered by qiaojuan and guiqiao, from Land Reform to the formation of full collectives. The overseas Chinese presence is particularly marked in Guangdong. In the mid-1950s there were more than six million qiaojuan

The Power of Words: Literacy and Revolution in South China, 1949-95

1. Introduction: Literacy and Society in South China 2. Minban Schools and the Reaffirmation of Voluntarism in Village Education 3. The Contested Priorities of Early Post-Revolutionary Mass Education 4. The Problem of the Teachers 5. Collectivization and the Increased Importance of Literacy 6. The National Literacy Campaigns of 1956 and 1958 7. Beijings Language Reform and Guangdongs Opposition 8. Literacy Expansion and Social Contraction: The Agricultural Middle School Experiment 1958-65 9. The Cultural Revolution 10. Literacy and Economic Development in the Post-Mao Era 11. The Struggle for Literacy in Guagndong Appendix: Educational Levels in Guagndong by District, City, and County 1982 Bibliography Notes Index

State Literacy Ideologies and the Transformation of Rural China

Did the spread of literacy in Chinas villages after 1949 bring economic, social and political empowerment to peasants or did it merely make possible the opposite, the historically unprecedented entrapment of rural production team members within bureaucratic webs of mass communication and social control? Chinas leaders expected it would do both. For them, the creation of a literate peasantry was inseparable from the goal of a strong state capable of mobilizing and marshalling the masses for political and economic tasks. Few features of the Chinese revolution can lay claim to a greater intrinsic importance than the vexed problem of literacy in the PRC and yet remain as iinderstiidiedi and rivien bv cnmnietinr claims and intmrnretqtinnz 1 A recent

Ma Xiangbo and the mind of modern China 1840-1939

Updated with examples through 2010, this classic study examines the disruptive effects of disasters on patterns of human behavior and the routine operations of government, and the conditions under which even relatively minor crises can lead to system breakdown. Integrating case studies of emergency management with studies of collective behavior, the author identifies factors that contribute to successful government handling of disaster situations and distills insights that can be used to improve these capacities at all levelsfederal, state, and local.

House Divided: Transnational Families in the Early Years of the People's Republic of China

Did the revolutionary changes that took place in China during the 1950s – involving the forceful destruction of the “landlord class”, marriage reform, and the state-led liberation of women – fundamentally transform the field of Chinese transnationalism? How were transnational Chinese families affected by these changes? The past decade has seen an explosion of interest in transnationalism and transnational families (Basch, Schiller and Szanton Blanc, 1994; Ong and Nonini, 1997; Ong, 1999; Li, 1999; Parreñas, 2001; Bao, 2003; Chan, 2005). Much of this literature is concerned with contemporary forms of transnationality. Indeed, transnationalism is often regarded as a phenomenon that has arisen in the last few decades as a result of changes in technology and shifts in the global order. Yet transnationalism – in the sense of migrant spaces that cannot be contained within the juridical boundaries or cultural imaginaries of nation-states – also has a history. There are a growing number of historical studies that “stretch Chinese transnationalism back beyond the confines of contemporary globalization” (Wickberg, 2002, p. 1; examples include McKeown, 1999; 1999a; Hsu, 2000; McKeown, 2001; Stevens, 2002; Szonyi, 2005; and chapters by Duara and Trocki in Ong and Nonini, 1997). Thus far, however, very little work has been done on transnational Chinese families in the 1950s, and how they were affected by the momentous changes then taking place in China. In this article I examine three sites of Chinese state intervention in transnational families in the 1950s in order to ask questions about the transnational family as a gendered institution whose members were engaged in a complex process of material as well as ideological and cultural production. The three sites of state intervention examined here – written communications among family members; marriage and divorce; and ownership of land and houses – were key elements in the creation and perpetuation of transnational families over space and time. Drawing upon a combination of official and academic Chinese sources and the Asian Studies Review March 2007, Vol. 31, pp. 25–40

Questioning the Dynamics and Language of Forced Migration in Asia: The experiences of ethnic Chinese refugees

To what extent are different parts of the world exceptional when it comes to the history of forced migration and refugee experiences? For instance, is forced migration in Asia distinct from developments elsewhere? Or is forced migration in Asia part of wider processes of displacement and emplacement so characteristic of the modern world? Over the past few decades, the fields of refugee and forced migration studies have ballooned. Scholars in a wide range of disciplines, including anthropology, political science, geography, and history have sought to understand the nature of population displacements in the modern world. Much of the early scholarship in this field focused on Europe in the immediate aftermath of the First and Second World Wars. Scholars have also sought to understand the nature of protracted refugee situations in Africa. 1 More recently, scholars have investigated forced migration within globalized and transnational frameworks. 2 Yet no sooner had scholars started to think of displacement in these terms than critics began to contend that the unique, and localized, dimensions of displaced populations, including refugees, forced migrants, and internally displaced people, were being ignored. Questions about what is gained and what is lost in approaching the study of modern refugee populations from various vantage points now frame much of the work in the fields of refugee and forced migration studies. 3